The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

The Saudi-Israeli-French Axis of Anxiety Over US-Iran Rapprochement

As US-Iran rapprochement inches toward at least partial consummation
in Geneva, I wish to offer a few observations:

1)The Iran
nuclear weapons threat has always been a McGuffin, an excuse for various powers
to advance an anti-Iran agenda.

2)Chief among the usual suspects is, of course,
Israel under PM Netanyahu.If the
Israeli government is able to spin Iran as a nuclear (almost) capable
existential threat to Israel, then Israel can make an absolute claim on US
sympathy, support, and protection.If
Iran returns to good relations with the United States, the US will arguably
become less willing to bear the sizable political, diplomatic, and economic
cost of deferring to Israel’s priorities—on the Palestinian question, on
regional security, and its obstinate refusal to acknowledge its nuclear arsenal
and integrate it into the international arms control regime.

3)The other regional power most interested in
thumping the Iran-threat drum is Saudi Arabia.However, I would argue that the high-profile anti-Iran stance of the
Kingdom (probably symbolized but not necessarily created by the notorious Prince
Bandar) has little to do with the threat of “Iran hegemonism” (a canard frequently
retailed in the big-name press) and a lot to do with Saudi Arabia’s decision to
go pro-active against the popular democratic agitation expressed by the Arab
Spring uprisings by supporting conservative Sunni theology and governance, not
just in Shi’ite inflected countries like Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, but
also in nations like Libya (where Saudi Arabia and its creature, the Gulf
Co-Operation Council were the primary motive force in demanding intervention against
Gaddafi) and Egypt.It’s easy for Saudi
Arabia to piggyback on the anti-Iran campaign promoted by the US and Israel and
cite Iranian subversion as a pretext for the campaign of conservative Sunni
rollback; if Iran is removed from the league table of existential enemies subverting
the Sunni heartland, Saudi Arabia is left in the exposed position of protecting
Wahhabi obscurantism against liberal democracy.That’s not a happy place to be.

4)Western observers have been rather surprised by
France’s unapologetic sabotage of the Iran nuclear
negotiations in Geneva at Israel's behest.I saw some
left-of-center complaining that France’s motivation was the greedy desire to muscle
in on the lucrative Saudi arms business.Perhaps, but I think the strategic nature of French involvement should
be emphasized.Recall that France’s
traditional sphere of influence in the Middle East has been the Levant—that chunk
of coastline that includes southern Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon.France claims a paternal interest in the
bloody, fascistic and pro-Israeli antics of the Lebanese Maronite community, a
Catholic grouping whose origins date back to the Crusades and is perhaps the
most conspicuous legacy of the French enthusiasm for meddling in the Middle
East.Before Syria blew up, France was
at the center of an initiative to install Bashar al-Assad in the affections of
the West.Also, recall that the Libyan
adventure was a creature of French enthusiasm; that France was also easily the
most eager advocate of a US military strike on Syria after somebody crossed
President Obama’s gas warfare red line.With the United States displaying a desire to tilt toward Iran, if only
a little bit, the Middle East jigsaw puzzle has been shaken up and France has
the best potential of any Western power to shape and profit from the new
alignment.We can justifiably bitch
about France carrying Israel’s water, but if the US pivots toward Asia, as it
has promised, there is a strong case for redefining the Arab Middle East as a
Mediterranean construct, with France playing the role of keystone (and Iran
scolder-in-chief).If Iran wants a
European ally, well, Germany is probably there for the asking.

For the edification of China Matters readers, I offer two pieces from the archives below the fold.

First, a piece on the longstanding Saudi eagerness to push dissent into the sectarian pigeonhole, not only in Bahrain but in the entire Persian Gulf region. Hopefully, this provides a corrective to the rather ludicrous assertions of Iranian subversion, typified by allegations that the minority Assad regime is suicidally promoting sectarianism in Syria. The truth is, the Sunni affiliation of the Syrian majority is considered to be a dragon to be awakened in the service of conservative Saudi rollback against non-sectarian democracy, both in the kingdom and in the region.

Second, a discussion of the perennial question of whether Israel can pose a credible unilateral threat to Iran’s nuclear program with a military strike. When I originally wrote the post, it was considered unlikely that Saudi Arabia would provide refueling facilities to Israeli fighter bombers, and plausible that the US occupying forces in Iraq might provide the service. How things have changed. Under the current circumstances, I would say that Saudi Arabia’s enthusiasm for fighting to the last American has simply been transferred to Israel. I think that neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia have the stomach to bomb Iran and, perhaps, start a regional war without strong US backing of the sort that the Obama administration appears loathe to provide; hope I’m right. In any case, the real game is in Syria and western Iraq, regions that if not for that exasperating problem of al Qaeda blowback, would be viewed with unalloyed joy as fertile fields for conservative Sunni rollback and continued bloodshed, no matter what happens with Iran.

Monday, April 04, 2011

Update: Justin Gengler, a University of Michigan graduate student,
did demographic work in Bahrain and is blogging on his findings at Religion and Politics in Bahrain.
According to Gengler, the government of Bahrain has been engaged in
stealth naturalization of Sunni immigrants (and, if I read the article
correctly, naturalization of Sunnis resident in the Saudi city of
Dammam) in order to dilute the Shi'a majority. He takes issue with the
commonly reported 70/30 Shi'a/Sunni split that I used in this post.
According to his research, conducted in 2009, the population of Bahrain
is now on the order of 58% Shi'a and 42% Sunni. CH, 4/5/11

While we are diverted by the opera-bouffe spectacle of the civil war in
Libya’s desert, a genuine tragedy—and potential geopolitical
trainwreck—is unfolding in Bahrain.

Those plucky demonstrators we saw occupying the Pearl Square roundabout
in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, have been swept away by government
security forces—together with the 300 foot monument at the roundabout,
which came to symbolize the aspirations of the protesters and was
therefore demolished by the government in a representative display of
heavy-handedness.

The Bahraini government received an important assist from Saudi Arabia,
which dispatched troops and tanks under a mutual security pact of the
Gulf Co-Operation Council called Peninsula Shield.

The government has gone to great and dangerous lengths to paint the
democratic aspirations of the peaceful, largely Shi’a demonstrators for
democracy as a sectarian assault on the emirate backed by that Gulf
boogeyman, Iran.

The repression has turned into an operation of conspicuous bigotry,
brutality, and mendacity that does not bode well for the future of the
emirate, political liberalization inside Saudi Arabia, or peaceful
coexistence between Iran and the Gulf states.

In recent days, Bahrain has used live ammunition—shotguns—against
demonstrators and blanketed Manama with checkpoints, some manned by
personnel masked with sinister black balaclavas. After a group of Shia
legislators resigned in protest, the government officially accepted
their resignations—so they could strip the legislators of their immunity
and render them liable to criminal charges. Main opposition
newspaper—shut down. Only hospital in Manama—occupied by security
forces so that wounded demonstrators can be apprehended, abused, and/or
disappeared.

In classic Orwellian doublespeak, the government declared that the
hospital had been “liberated”. “Liberating” the hospital apparently
involved beating at least one male nurse senseless in the parking lot.

Beneath it all, a dangerous undercurrent of government fear and rage.

It looks like the Bahrain and Saudi security forces are utterly out of
their depth. Their state of reference is pursuing and suppressing
terrorists. By treating these peaceful, non-sectarian demonstrators as
sectarian terrorists, they seem to be sowing the seeds of the emirate’s
eventual destruction.

The expected outcome of systematic government-directed hatred would be
ethnic cleansing, but there’s one problem with that. Shi’a are not a
marginalized and easily purged minority; they are the majority,
accounting for about 70% of the native population. The Sunni—who
dominate the island in cooperation with their Saudi allies—are the
minority. If one counts the large army of foreign workers in the
emirate, the Sunni bosses account for less than 10% of the population.

No wonder the Sunni emir felt he needed some Saudi muscle.

The prognosis seems to be embittered Shi’a majority and paranoid Sunni
rulers in Bahrain. Even under ordinary circumstances, Shi’a are
inclined to a lively sense of grievance concerning historical and
current Sunni persecution, raising the prospect of security problems
for Saudi Arabia in handling its own Shi’a minority (about 15%) even
after the stompings and beatings quiet things in Manama.

The big story in the Gulf appears to be that many of the governments,
with weak to non-existent popular bases, vulnerability to democratic
agitation, an inability to accommodate dissent (unless “accommodation”
means bouncing a nightstick off somebody’s head and hauling them away),
and an uncertain sense of where the Obama administration stands on the
whole "democratic values vs. strategic interests" conundrum, are
panicking and in need of a scapegoat to justify heavy-handed security
measures that will otherwise alienate significant (ironically,
significant moderate) sections of their populace.

The spooked regimes are justifying their disproportionate reaction by
claiming the demonstrations are part of a seditious scheme sponsored by
Iran and Hezbollah. A war of words has already broken out between Iran
and Bahrain and Saudi Arabia over the issue. Turning the Gulf states’
rhetoric against them, Iran declared that Bahrain has forfeited its
legitimacy, implying that Iran can do an R2P intervention on behalf of
the embattled Shi’a of Bahrain like the humanitarian intervention the
Gulf Co-operation Council incited in Libya.

The clownish nature of reporting on Bahrain was revealed when a leader
declared he wanted the emirate to solve its problems without outside
interference, Iranian or Saudi. This was of course headlined in the
Saudi-owned al Arabiya as Bahrain’s Shiite opposition asks Iran not to meddle.

The seemingly suicidal line of framing the issue as Iran-fueled
sectarian jealousy instead of legitimate democratic agitation was
carried on in the article by a Bahraini official:

"We want to affirm to the world that we don't have a problem between
the government and the opposition ... There is a clear sectarian problem
in Bahrain. There is division within society," Sheikh Khaled said.

Don’t forget Kuwait, which is about to execute two Iranians and a
Kuwaiti for spying, is expelling three Iranian diplomats from Kuwait,
and has withdrawn its ambassador from Tehran.

An informative article on the Kuwait affair in Arab Times
quotes an analyst in Dubai as saying that “the Kuwaiti government was
‘under huge pressure from Sunni MPs ... and the media to take action,
not to let this go without proving their displeasure.’”

An April 3 article in Arab Times, Persian Conspiracy seen to target GCC countries,
gives another hint of where things are going, along the line of runaway
paranoia, scaremongering, and propaganda overreach, courtesy of that
ubiquitous government mouthpiece, "Sources say":

KUWAIT
CITY, April 3: The Iranian plan includes dangerous plots against the
Gulf nations, not just Bahrain. Kuwait, in particular, is one of the
targets and the spy network is only a tip of the iceberg, because the
main objective is for the Iranian Naval Forces to invade some islands in
the country and other Gulf nations under the pretext of protecting
Shiites in Bahrain, say security sources in the Gulf.

Sources disclosed the Bahraini and Kuwaiti foreign ministers revealed
the conspiracy uncovered by the security departments in both countries
in the recently-concluded meeting of the GCC foreign ministers in
Riyadh. After hearing the report, the GCC foreign ministers presented
recommendations, which will be implemented soon, because the GCC nations
are keen on revealing the truth to the international community.
Sources said the implementation of the Iranian plan started several
months ago, claiming the chaos and conflicts in Bahrain are just the
beginning of an attempt to disrupt peace in the Kingdom. Sources
revealed the initial plan was for the unrest to continue for two to
three weeks in order to give the Iranian, other Arab and international
satellite stations enough time to extensively cover the massacre of
Shiites in the country.

Consider that plot to have the international media to "extensively cover the massacre of Shiites" pretty much foiled.

One doesn’t hear much about the brutal suppression of dissent in Bahrain in the Western media.

Ssome say the Libyan adventure was part of a plan to distract the West
with a lovely little war against a crazy dictator so the journos
wouldn’t be out covering the over-the-top suppression of a bona fide
democracy movement by Saudi Arabia’s BFF (and host to Commander, United
States Naval Forces Central Command (COMUSNAVCENT) / United States Fifth
Fleet and 1500 US personnel) Bahrain.

Credit where credit is due: Newsmax, which often traffics in eye-rolling right-wing paranoia, had a good article
on Bahrain by Ken Timmerman. When Newsmax has to carry the load for
American news organizations, you know the situation is pretty grim.

Iran’s PressTV has tried to make Bahrain their CNN/Al Jazeera moment.

There is a sizable void to fill, since CNN has reported very little on
Bahrain (four of their correspondents were detained and released only
after signing
"an undertaking not to exceed the limits of their mission"--they
ostensibly entered Bahrain to report on "social media" but instead tried
to report on the disturbances).

I didn't find any signs that the U.S. State Department stood up for America's press freedom agenda in this particular case.

Al Jazeera, owned by Qatar, has no interest in airing the dirty and/or bloody linen of the emir next door.

Bahraini hospitality toward news-gatherers of the Persian menace obviously has its limits.

Press TV's most recent report featured its Bahrain correspondent, Aris
Roussinos, pushing a luggage cart through Heathrow Airport while giving
an informative and thoughtful interview
on the kinds of things that the Bahrain government was apparently not
at all keen on him seeing as he spent a week in Bahrain evading the
authorities and observing the crackdown.

If freedom-loving consumers of global media find Iranian reporting
intolerable, however, here’s a 17-minute clip from an Australian
investigative show called Dateline. It features nervy reporting
by reporter Yaara Bou Melhem from inside Bahrain, and a stark picture of
the hidden war that we’re not supposed to see.

The reporting is deliberately low-key, a welcome contrast to the
hyperventilating outrage needed to keep the humanitarian intervention
balloon inflated in Libya (or the anti-Iranian jihad barreling along in
the Gulf states, for that matter).

In one sequence, a Human Rights Watch representative directs the
reporter’s attention to a crime scene that has come to symbolize the
worst excesses of Bahrain’s riot police: the place where a young man,
Hani Jumah, was beaten. Apparently, he was not a demonstrator; he was
just in the wrong place at the wrong time as riot police swept the area.
The camera pans on the bloodstained floor of a deserted construction
site as the HRW staffer relates with forensic detachment: “We found
fragments of his kneecap...we also found one of his teeth.” And you’re
left to wonder: how does someone get beaten so severely a piece of his
kneecap is dislodged from his body? The young man was taken to the
hospital for treatment, then got disappeared from the hospital. His
family was summoned to retrieve his body four days later.

I originally found the Dateline clip on the Facebook page
of Bahrain’s leading human rights activist, Nabeel Rajab. He’s
featured in the report, describing how 25 masked security personnel paid
him a night visit to object to his activities with a three-hour session
of interrogation and verbal and physical abuse.

A consistent theme is the persistent efforts of the regime and its
personnel to characterize opposition as “sectarian”. One wounded
protester described being beaten in the hospital (before he was
transported to a police station for further beatings) and being told
that he had ruined the country and would be “sent back to Iran.”

Nabeel’s site is mostly in Arabic. But if you open Google translator in
a separate tab, you can cut and paste the text and a surprisingly good
English translation floats onto the screen like a message from another
world—which, if you think in terms of the media blackout in Bahrain, is
exactly where it’s coming from.

Friday, February 03, 2012

“Israel
to attack Iran” is a hardy if never-blooming perennial. I rerun this
post (originally written on the occasion of Israel’s bombing of an
alleged nuclear facility in Syria in 2007) every year as a reminder of
the rather daunting technical issues involved in flying from Israel to
Iran and blowing things up in a truly convincing fashion, even as the
same threats are put forward again and again.

Blowing
things up in a truly convincing fashion involves a) flying there b)
getting refueled in mid-air c) getting rearmed d) going back and do it
again and again against Iran’s dispersed and hardened nuclear
facilities.

So
it won’t be an orgasmic one-off like the Osiraq reactor strike against
Iraq, a nice quasi-surgical demonstration of civilized Israeli warfare.
It would be a grinding, prolonged assault, presumably with plenty of
Iranian casualties, and with the unmistakable, sustained assistance of a
local ally to keep the planes in the air.

Iran’s
nuclear facilities are beyond the combat range of Israel’s fighter
bombers. So Israeli planes would not only need to overfly Iraq or Saudi
Arabia and/or Turkey with or without permission; they would have need
to get refueled over Iraq or Saudi Arabia as well on the return trip.

It
doesn’t look like the US is going to provide refueling facilities,
leaving it up to local partners (unlikely/infeasible) or Israel itself.

This
year, the presence of a pro-Iranian government in Iraq would make it
necessary for Israel to cross Iraqi airspace without permission, and
defy the Iraqi government in prolonged fashion by having Israel’s
tankers hovering over Iraq for multiple bouts of mid-air refueling.

And
I don’t think Turkey’s going to be keen about permitting overflight,
since they aren’t even signing on to the proposed bilateral sanctions
against Iran.

That
leaves the Saudis. Saudi Arabia is in the midst of an aggressive
rollback against Iran in particular and Shi’ites in general, and the
London Times quoted an anonymous Saudi source as saying Israeli jets
attacking Iran would be waved through Saudi airspace.

Doesn’t
quite pass the smell test for me, though. I don’t think the Saudi
government is happy to harass the Iranians, but I don’t think they have
the stomach for taking the Israeli side in a full-blown war.

On the record comments
in December from Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia’s top security honcho,
will undoubtedly be dismissed as disinformation by Western observers
because he’s calling for a nuclear-free Middle East (a slap at Israel!),
but I think his statement more closely reflect Saudi reality:

Replying to a question about the possibility of an attack on Iran to force it to roll back its nuclear program and the impact of such an action, Prince Turki reiterated that the impact will be “calamitous … cataclysmic, not just catastrophic.”

He said that Iranian actions have provoked worldwide opposition but at the same time suggests that Iran's nuclear program is being singled out, while Israel is being given a clean chit. Any unilateral decision to launch a military attack aimed at halting the nuclear program of Iran could have huge consequences, he warned.

As
to the technical issues of refueling, the IDF has made a big deal of
demonstrating that it does not need US refueling services, as this report indicates:

In the last days of May and first week of June, 2008, Israel staged an impressive and well-reported exercise over Crete with the participation of the Greek air force. More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighter jets, as well as Israeli rescue helicopters and mid-air refueling planes flew a massive number of mock strikes. Israeli planes reportedly never landed but were continuously refueled from airborne platforms. Israel demonstrated that a 1400 km distance could be negotiated with Israeli aircraft remaining aloft and effective. Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facility is 1400 km from Israel.

Early in 2011, the Jersusalem Post reported
Israel took delivery of a 707 for conversion into a tanker for
refueling its F15-I fighter bombers coming back for Iran. How many
additional tankers Israel has is “classified”, but an unsourced thread puts the total number of converted 707s to eight.

The JPost article went on to say:

The
air force has conducted a major upgrade of its tanker fleet in recent
years and now plans to wait for the US Air Force to choose its future
tanker before buying additional aircraft.

Reading
between the lines, maybe the United States is not particularly keen on
delivering tankers and enhancing Israel’s capability to conduct
unilateral air operations against Iran.

Accordingto Karl Vick at Time magazine, Israel doesn’t have the tanker capacity or, for that matter the ordnance, to devastate Iran for weeks:

What
everyone agrees, however, is that as formidable as the Israeli Air
Force is, it simply lacks the capacity to mount the kind of sustained,
weeks-long aerial bombardment required to knock down Iran’s nuclear
program, with the requisite pauses for damage assessments followed by
fresh waves of bombing. Without forward platforms like air craft
carriers, Israel’s air armada must rely on mid-air refueling to reach
targets more than 1,000 miles away, and anyone who reads Israel’s order of battle sees it
simply doesn’t have but a half dozen or so. Another drawback noted by
analysts is Israel’s inventory of bunker-busting bombs, the sort that
penetrate deep into concrete or rock that shield the centrifuge arrays
at Natanz and now Fordow, near Qum. Israel has loads of GBU-28s, which
might penetrate Natanz. But only the U.S. Air Force has the 30,000-pound
Massive Ordnance Penetrator that could take on Fordow, the mountainside
redoubt where critics suspect Iran would enrich uranium to military
levels.

So, why do we keep talking about Israel’s threats to attack Iran?

I’ve
frequently commented that the main purpose of the attack-Iran threat is
to yank America’s chain, and forestall possible rapprochement between
the United States and Iran.

The
Obama administration knows this, I think, and I find its
politically-motivated willingness to continue with the sanctions
charade, and the low level but cruel and destabilizing program of
assassination, sabotage, and economic warfare against Iran rather
shameful.

Friday, October 05, 2007

The Mystery of the Dropped Fuel Tanks

An e-mail from a reader concerning the Israeli raid on a purported North-Korea-linked military facility in Syria stated:

FYI, the combat radius of an F-15 in deep strike mode is 1800km
The distance to the Syrian target is ~ 700 km.

No need for drop tanks........

Hmmm. Too interesting to pass up.

The Internet is a treasure trove for armchair commanders and aviation
and weapons enthusiasts. Industrious googling yielded the following
information:

During the raid, some Israeli aircraft jettisoned two external fuel tanks up by the Turkish border.

The tanks were from an F-15I fighter bomber , called the “Ra’am” or “Thunder”, itself the Israeli variant of the F-15E Strike Eagle.

In agreement with my correspondent, the Observer states the Ra’am is:

...the newest generation of Israeli long-range bomber, which has a
combat range of over 2,000km when equipped with the drop tanks.

But I think the Observer (and perhaps *gasp* a loyal reader) got it
wrong. Either they confused cruising range with combat range, or
confused the current F15I with its previous incarnations (for instance
the F15C does have a combat radius of 2000 km).

The F-15E is a completely different animal from previous F-15s, which
were sleek interceptors, designed “without a pound for the ground” i.e.
no air to ground armament, for those days of air-to-air combat with the
parfait knights of the Soviet bloc.

The F-15E is a big, fat hog of a plane, sometimes nicknamed the Flying Tennis Court, or Rodan for its resemblance to the ungainly but murderous superpterodactyl featured in the Godzilla movies.

It’s meant to carry big bombs and missiles to blow up stuff on the
ground and the people standing in it or next to it, and fight its way
out if necessary.

So it’s got bigger engines and less range than previous F15s.

According to the data I dug up, the F-15E has a combat radius—the
distance it can be expected to fly for a mission assuming high speed,
fuel-consuming maneuvers--of 790 miles (see here and here ).

To achieve this radius, it needs its internal fuel plus external fuel.

Internal fuel capacity is 5,952 kg.

External fuel consists of two components:

Conforming fuel tanks or CFTs
with a total capacity of 4500 kg. They are integral parts of the
plane—one report I read said the plane isn’t really designed to fly
without them—and can’t be jettisoned.

Then there’s another 5500 kg in conventional external fuel tanks—the kind that were dropped during the mission.

With a fistful of caveats, the combat radius for an F-15I without the external fuel tanks would be around 500+ miles.

Distance from the Hatzerim airbase (home of the F-15I-equipped 69th Squadron) near Beersheba to Dayr az Zawr: 420 miles.

So you might think that the conventional external fuel tanks weren’t
needed for this particular mission, and the only reason to carry them
was for road-testing prior to some Iran-related hanky-panky.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

If the Israelis really did bomb Dayr az Zawr, it’s unclear why they went
barnstorming up to the Turkish border a hundred miles away.

But they certainly did go, and to fly that kind of mission including a
flyby of the Turkish border, I think they would need the external fuel
tanks.

Maybe the Turkey excursion was to test some fancy new electronic
countermeasures equipment mounted on another plane, called “Suter”, to
disrupt Russian air defense hardware recently supplied to Syria—and
Iran, for Israel’s benefit and our own.

A Kuwaiti newspaper wrote that "Russian experts are studying why the
two state-of-the art Russian-built radar systems in Syria did not detect
the Israeli jets entering Syrian territory. Iran reportedly has asked
the same question, since it is buying the same systems and might have
paid for the Syrian acquisitions."

We got a certain amount of military chest-thumping about how cool this
new gear is, but these planes only jettison their fuel tanks if they’ve
been engaged and need extra speed and mobility, which leads one to
believe it couldn’t have worked too great.

As to Israeli insistence that they’ll take out Iran if we can’t get off our collective rears, I found this analysis interesting and persuasive.

It argues that the Israeli air force simply doesn’t have the horses to
haul the armament needed to make a terminal dent in the hardened and
dispersed Iranian facilities on a 1200-mile mission—remember, more fuel
means fewer weapons carried--unless the U.S. either assists in the
refueling of the Israeli planes or allows them to stage the assault U.S.
from bases in Iraq.

And maybe not even then.

Bottom line:

Theoretically, the Israelis could do this, but at great risk of
failure. If they decide to attack Natanz, they will have to inflict
sufficient damage the first time - they probably will not be able to
mount follow-on strikes at other facilities.

When all the analyses are done, there is only one military capable of
the sustained widespread air operations required to eliminate Iran's
nuclear weapons research program - the United States.

So it looks like the Israelis could start something—but it would be up to Uncle Sam to finish the job.

I take this as support for my thesis
that a key data point for Israel from the Syria raid was the nature of
the U.S. support it did—or did not—elicit, and what that would mean for
Israel if it conducted a dramatic but less than conclusive raid on
Natanz with the hope that the U.S. could be dragged into the campaign.

So: War with Iran—it’s up to us. Don’t know whether that’s reassuring or disturbing.

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